Andrija Artuković was a Croatian lawyer, politician, and senior member of the ultranationalist and fascist Ustasha movement, who served as the Minister of Internal Affairs and Minister of Justice in the Government of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during World War II in Yugoslavia. He signed into law a number of racial laws against Serbs, Jews, and Roma, and was responsible for a string of concentration camps in which over 100,000 civilians were tortured and murdered. He escaped to the United States after the war, where he lived until extradited to Yugoslavia in 1986. He was tried and found guilty of a number of mass killings in the NDH, and was sentenced to death, but the sentence was not carried out due to his age and health. He died in custody in 1988.

The Ustaše, also known by anglicised versions Ustasha or Ustashe, was a Croatian, fascist and ultranationalist organization active, as one organization, between 1929 and 1945, formally known as the Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Movement. Since the inception and before the Second World War, its members engaged in a series of terrorist activities against the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, including collaborating with IMRO to assassinate King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in 1934. After the invasion of Yugoslavia by Axis forces in April 1941, the Ustaše were handed power by the occupying forces and formed the Independent state of Croatia, an Axis puppet state, and immediately went on to perpetrate the Holocaust and genocide against its Jewish, Serb and Roma populations. During the World War II in Yugoslavia, together with German and Italian occupying forces, Ustaše are responsible for killing of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma, as well as Bosniak Muslim and Croat political dissidents.